Start Small – [Embellished Greeting Cards]

Handwriting is Cathartic

In this article, I’m going to teach you how to make your own fabric embellished greeting card step-by-step PLUS a video to help you see the steps in action. [Scroll down for the video]

Did you have a pen pal when you were younger?  I didn’t have one but when I was in high school, my best friend left to go and study abroad.  And it was so hard for me to see her go. But what made it possible for me to cope with her absence was that we wrote to each other every week. I started by writing her a letter just before she left and I continued every week after. 

My daughter went away to school this fall, and I know I’m going to miss her a lot.  So remembering my previous experience from years back, I’ve decided I’ll write to her often to help me not miss her too much.  

Someone told me her mother wrote one hundred nineteen (119) letters to her during her first year in school.  I’m not planning on coming close to that record.

But I do love writing especially, with my hands.  And I don’t do that type of writing very much these days.  So this is a good opportunity for me to get back to writing this way. I enjoy both writing and receiving handwritten notes. I can only hope my daughter does too. 🙂

To kick off my writing I made my own greeting cards by embellishing them with fabric.  I’ve wanted to do this (a fabric embellished greeting card) for the longest time.  But there hadn’t been a good incentive to do so until now.

I bought a pack of blank greeting cards from A.C. Moore. They carry white cards, ivory colored cards, and multi-colored cards. I decided to go for the ivory cards. I bought a pack of 50.

Making Fabric Embellished Greeting Cards

I didn’t have a plan for how I was going to do this.  All I knew was I wanted to draw as well as use a collage of fabric circles. So I started by drawing a cup.

When I don’t know where to start a project, I usually start with what I know, what is familiar and then I push off from there with some more challenging stuff.

After drawing the cup, I tried to use my micron pens to draw some circles, but I wasn’t very successful there. I couldn’t get a good rhythm going.  So I jumped to cutting out the circular shapes from my fabric scraps.  That went quite well.  Because it didn’t really require much thinking.

Then I started to glue the fabric collage pieces to the front of the card. I love improvisations and abstract work because they call on you using your understanding of the principles and elements of good design, which I find fascinating. Although these are standard rules, you get to interpret them in your own way and that’s what makes every person’s work unique.

So I spent some time creating a composition with my fabric pieces and my cup drawing. Since cutting the fabric circles was a repetitive process which didn’t require much thinking, it allowed my subconscious to work on ideas for drawing the circles I’d previously abandoned. By the time I’d done a bit of gluing, my mind was racing with ideas for drawing circles.

Between cutting, gluing and drawing, I made my first fabric embellished greeting card. I’m so happy with it. I hope my daughter loves it. 

Creativity Lesson

I haven’t created anything big for a while.  Too much going on in my life right now.  What with my kids’ new educational adventures, managing a regional exhibition, writing articles, and creating courses. But standing still makes your skills rust. So I’m not standing still. Working small is better than not making anything at all.

If you find yourself in the season of life, where you don’t have much capacity to make big things then:

Start Small!

No mater what you do, 

Don’t Stand Still!

Making Fabric Embellished Greeting Cards [Video Tutorial]

Here’s the video tutorial. Watch and enjoy, then leave a comment letting me know what you think!

 

Question:

Do you like hand-writing letters? Have you ever made a fabric embellished greeting card? What do you think of my first fabric embellished greeting card? Can’t wait to read your comments.

My Warmest Regards,

 

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Also published on Medium.